A rosette plant is roughly built up from a basis of growing points from which new leaves and roots grow. In an adult plant, this basis is relatively large in size and comprises a large number of sprouted leaves. By placing a part of the rosette plant in a specific medium, growing points or other plant parts can be incited to form shoots. In this manner, a lump piece of rosette plants is formed, designated below as “lump piece”. The asexual multiplication takes place by cutting this lump piece into parts and placing the individual parts on a growing medium. These parts form new shoots, which again form a new lump piece, so that a multiplication process results, which can be repeated several times. In this manner, many, up to as many as thousands of, copies can be cultured from one single plant. This process is referred to as plant multiplication.
Although this process is substantially relatively simple in nature, the practical conditions in which the process is carried out are of great importance to be able to realize a sufficiently large and germ-free yield. It is crucial, then, to check the ambient conditions; in particular, it is important that the multiplication nearly always takes place sterilely. In addition, the separation of the lump piece is relatively difficult, because the lump often has a diverging shape and size, and because it is of importance to damage growing points as less as possible. A damaged cutting will show a decreased growth on the damaged parts, so that the occurrence of damage during separation has a relatively large negative effect on the yield. These problems have resulted in that contrary to automated multiplication techniques for other types of plants, such as stem plants, for rosette plants satisfactory techniques enabling the multiplication to be carried out automatically have not been developed as yet.